View full sizeGoogle MapsIn these contrasting Google Maps, the neighborhood in Pittsbugh (top) surrounding the Forbes Field historical site/park and (bottom) Detroit's Corktown neighborhood where the former Tiger Stadium site has been decreed as too valuable for development by government officials.

When Pittsburgh tore down Forbes Field so the University of Pittsburgh could build a new student center, they left standing remnants of the old ballpark as part of a green space that includes a baseball field.

Of course, as you can see by Google Map images to your right, Forbes Field's neighborhood in Pittsburgh looks like something akin to dropping downtown Ann Arbor on top of Wayne State, while Tiger Stadium's Corktown, technically one of Detroit's most vibrant neighborhoods, looks like it's in a city with 40 square miles of vacant land.

Somehow I think those dumbskis in Pittsburgh will be ok, despite wasting valuable development land on a park and Forbes Field attraction. So, why did the Steel City get this right from a development standpoint while the Motor City keeps getting it wrong? It's a question that's so much bigger than the nine acres at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull.

Napoleon in rags, to quote Dylan

To understand the former Tiger Stadium site, you have to understand that Detroit's economy is unlike any other place in the United States or, really, anywhere within the G7 group of nations. We're tin-pot, not world-class, and Detroit can't be a world-class city without a world-class economy.

The city's largest landowner is the city itself. Five of Detroit's ten largest employers are government entities. Three more (Henry Ford Health System, Detroit Medical Center, and Wayne State) are quasi-governmental public institutions. Only General Motors (#8) and Chrysler (#9) are legitimately private enterprises, but they required government intervention to avoid liquidation.

So we have to consider Detroit through a different economic lens than almost any other municipality or market. When Jackson turns down Chevrolet's offer to redevelop the Tiger Stadium site into a first-class ballpark, he says the property has major development value. He isn't saying that it would fetch a high price if it were auctioned off tomorrow, or even three years from now. He's saying that, in the vacuum of real estate metrics, Tiger Stadium has certain advantages that another site (say, the Love Canal) may not have.

Unfortunately, in the real world, that's not how value is assigned. Something is only as valuable as what someone will spend (in time, money, and effort) on it. For Tiger Stadium, the site's only real value (as determined by the marketplace) is as a baseball field. Guys like George Jackson don't get that concept because they manage Detroit's Hyman Roth-like command economy from inside this artificial economy's protective bubble.

Since the stadium's demolition in 2009, baseball fans and Corktown residents have invested time and money improving the site as a baseball field. Since 1999, when the Tigers left for Comerica Park, the city and the DEGC have conducted multiple requests for proposals for Tiger Stadium--both before and after demolition--and those efforts failed to identify a single suitable developer to meet city/DEGC standards for any kind of project at Michigan and Trumbull. In the meantime, they dumped millions of taxpayer dollars in securing the stadium and then the site, while "marketing" it for redevelopment.

Even if such an interest existed, it's hard to believe that user couldn't make their project work on a million other hunks of dirt within spitting distance of Tiger Stadium. That way, Detroit would have two things! A fancy, new development and first-rate a ball field for the city's kids. At present, we get neither. Because of progress.

To be clear, this isn't about whether the Tigers' move to Comerica Park or the stadium's demolition were good or bad ideas. That doesn't matter.

For the record, I was employed by Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy back when partial preservation/restoration was on the table. Despite an obvious bias toward saving the thing, parlor debates about the city's decision are boring. It's like debating the Doyle Alexander-for-John Smoltz trade. Whatever anyone thinks at this point, it doesn't matter. They tore it down, and in fairness, no other city ever tried to adaptively reuse a former Major League park. It is what it is. Move on.

Besides, the DEGC's obtuse refusal to acknowledge the one viable use for a post-demolition corner of Michigan and Trumbull is more troubling.

Dylan, again: When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose

Which brings me back to my initial point about Detroit's abnormal economic climate. There is in Peru a market economist named Hernando de Soto whose life's work involves finding ways to confer formal property title to people for property they informally "own" in places where formal ownership hasn't really existed, or--like Detroit--where land ownership is the primary province of the state.

De Soto argues in a rump system of concentrated formal ownership, the true owner isn't the leviathan with legalistic ownership, but the user. A third world shanty town may be technically government property, but at the street level, everyone knows what belongs to whom. That informal system of "ownership," according to de Soto, should be respected and codified.

The parallels are obvious. While the city/DEGC may technically own Tiger Stadium, the site would be a weed-strewn, trash-filled lot like so much of Detroit's 40 square miles of vacant (mostly city-owned) land if the city actually controlled the site. Fortunately, Tiger Stadium has de facto "owners" who have given the site real value and real purpose as a ball field.

Chevrolet recognizes the value created by these grassroots market forces. Chevy's marketers aren't pondering obscure Latin American economists or abstract ideas like informal ownership, but they understand the potential value in attaching their brand to the activity at Tiger Stadium. That's real economic activity, unlike the city's decade-old fiction about attracting development.

Unfortunately for Detroit, city development officials and their apologists are married to this broken state-driven economy that's waiting on Godot to build 40 square miles of unicorn farms and rainbow factories while thwarting actual, market-driven, and sustainable land uses.